The Power of Open Source for Business

SugarCRM has their Global Developers Conference later this week. It's their first ever and it should be a fun event. I'll be speaking there on Thursday morning. There's a developer track as well as an IT Manager track as well as some excellent training sessions. The conference is in San Jose May 3-5. If you're using SugarCRM or even thinking about it, this is a bargain event.

Nokia has been making great strides in developing a family of small, pocket sized multimedia devices. There's the Nokia N800 wi-fi enabled Internet Tablet as well as the recent N95 multimedia phone (though not yet available in the US.) I wouldn't quite call them computers yet --at least until they add a proper keyboard, but they are interesting multi-function devices.

Nokia recently launched the quite humorous www.greatpockets.com web site, which features a mythical Saville Row tailor Henry Needle & Sons who designs men's and women's clothing with, ah, great big pockets in which they can load all their bulky electronic equipment. The web site has several funny flash videos and a faux expose. Last week I was travelling in Europe with laptop, phone, ipod, camera, travel guitar, headphone amplifier, three headsets and two chargers, it seemed like it might be a pretty good idea.

On Tuesday we kicked off the main conference session with keynotes by Marten Mickos, Guy Kawasaki (famous blogger who talked about the art of innovation) and Mike Evans (from Red Hat who talked about the One Laptop Per Child project). Photos (including the one above) have been posted by James Duncan Davidson and are available on Flickr.

Marten's keynote focused on the architecture of participation as well as some of the technology innovation in our community and at MySQL and updates on our business. Marten also gave awards to our application, partner and community contributors of the year. The application winners were: YouTube, Adobe and Amp'd mobile. The partners of the year were: Red Hat, HP and Carahsoft, our government reseller. And the community members of the year were Sheeri Kritzer (super blogger!), Paul McCullough (PBXT storage egnine author) and Martin Friebe (quality contributor). It's great to see so much innovation and enthusiasm in our community and there are lots of new ideas on how we can be even more open and participative going forward. Check out the links below for more information on the keynotes. (Note the video on Guy Kawasaki is from a different conference ;-) Thanks to the bloggers doing live reporting! You guys rock.

The tutorials on Monday included topics such as Scaling, MySQL Cluster, Replication, MySQL 5.1, MySQL Monitoring & Advisory Service, Performance Tuning, Writing your own storage engine and other topics. Special thanks to all the tutorial presenters including Brian Aker, Lars, Mats, Kai Voigt, Roland, Sarah, Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith (who was guiding people with hands-on instruction w/ Cluster!), JD Duncan, Andy Bang, Rob Young, Domas and others who helped make these sessions a success. Many of the sessionswere sold out and just jam packed with people eager to learn more.

And we had a great partner meeting which had more partners than ever before. I was told that over 80 registered but there were close to 150 in the room. (Maybe because they heard there would be beer at the end!) We rolled out our new MECA partner program (but maybe we should say it's a MEGA partnerprogram since there are so many partners!) and Robin and Jeffrey also shared our roadmap with the partners which went over well.

The MySQL Conference kicks off this week in Santa Clara through Thursday. We have tutorials and various customer and partner meetings today. Some of the tutorials are sold out, but you can still register on site. The main conference program starts Tuesday and there will be news announcements each day.

There's been a couple of late additions to the program which should be pretty cool, including a session called HA MySQL on EC2. It sounds like a lot of acronyms, but it's very interesting stuff. It's all about using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to create a virtual hosted scale out solution to high availability MySQL applications that you pay for "by the drink." So if you imagine a web application which can have huge swings in demand and capacity, you can simply provision more computing power at any time. Instead of buying hundreds of servers which are idle much of the time, you can provision dynamically when needed and pay only when you fully need the capacity. The Amazon guys behind EC2 have flown half way around the globe to bring this session to the conference.

This is a prety interesting topic and definitely one that will become even more important in the future.

One of the coolest mashup technologies around is Yahoo! Pipes. It's a web-based application that enables you to visually create new web apps by aggregating web feeds and other web services in new ways. Much like you could create pipes and filters to deal with text on Unix, this enables you to do the same with data coming from web sites. Tim O'Reilly called it "a milestone in the history of the Internet" which is pretty high praise from the guy who coined Web 2.0. Our MySQL community manager Jay Pipes (no relation :-) worked with one of Yahoo's top MySQL gurus Jeremy Zawodny to arrange to get the guys from Yahoo Pipes into a keynote spot at the MySQL conference next week. The final description is still being written, but it will be pretty exciting.

I expect Yahoo! Pipes will have a huge impact in inspiring other forms of mashups inside and outside the Enterprise. Check out the samples here.

One of the keynote panels from the Web 2.0 Expo featured three entrepreneurs of companies that are heavy users of MySQL: Joe Kraus (JotSpot), Mena Trott (SixApart) and Jay Adelson (Digg). It was one of the more interesting discussions dealing with companies at different stages of considering their independence.

I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo earlier today to participate in a panel on next generation web 2.0 platforms and how the hardware, software and network infrastructure would evolve. The panel had a diverse crowd ranging from a Microsoft dude who had experience with 1,000+ server scale-out scenarios, a networking appliance guru from Crescendo Networks, one of the guys from Amazon's EC2 web services initiative and the moderator Alistair Croll from Coradiant who is a serious data center infrastructure and performance management wiz. Being a software guy, it had a bit more hardware / networking focus than I'm used to.

As much as we might want to see the evolution of data centers to be managed "in the sky" I think we'll continue to see a mixed environment for a long time. By mixed environment, I mean hosted software as a service co-existing with in-house deployments as well as open source co-existing with closed source. The reality is, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for all companies or even necessarily within a single company.

We had a decent crowd, I think somewhere around 400 people, and some good questions from the audience. The most amazing thing was that this was one of 6 different tracks taking place at the same time and there were over 3,000 paid attendees at the conference and several thousand more for the tradeshow expo and keynotes. Wow. It's also clear that open source has become the default infrastructure for web 2.0.

We'll have more discussions about how open source scales out the web 2.0 applications at the MySQL user conference next week. If you're a late registrant, ping me if you want to get the discount code.

At the MySQL Conference & Expo April 23-26 in Santa Clara, we'll be introducing for the first time the idea of a "Guru Bar." Taking a tip from Apple's highly successful in-store "genius bar" (which I've found to deliver excellent service" we decided to up the ante at our conference. Our Guru Bar will be staffed by top notch MySQL gurus including our System Engineers, Developers, Consultants, Training and Support Engineers. You can come by, bring your technical challenges or problems and we'll help you resolve them. Heck, bring your toughest problem, your laptops and your teams and we'll work together with you to solve them right there at the conference. I expect this will be a fun part of the conference and something that makes it different from other conferences that might focus more on theory.

There'll be plenty of visionary Keynotes, but we also want to make sure it's a very practical technical conference where you can meet the developers behind MySQL. You can also get certified at the conference and we'll be introducing a new FREE level of certification. Several of the tutorials are set up to help you get certified.

The MySQL Conference & Expo coming up April 23-26 in Santa Clara will feature a dozen or more Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. These go beyond the main sessions and keynotes of the conference to provide additional interactive sessions with many of the leading MySQL developers and gurus. Topics range from data warehousing, storage engines, Java, testing techniques and more. The topics are still being finalized and you can submit your own BoF topic on anything you're interested in discussing.